"Read This!" Book Club

Read This! is a semi-regular national book club started in 2002 by the ABC morning talk and information series Good Morning America, which utilizes suggestions from local reading clubs around the country. This reading club has featured both novels and non-fiction titles. Although Good Morning America continues to feature books and authors as guests, they appear to have discontinued their "Read This!" book club as a regular feature.

2004 Selections

Ronald Reagan's daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer's disease. Moving and honest, this is an illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a woman and her father.

As Hannah Pearl's memories of her 1940 escape to England from war-torn France all but erase her more recent American life, each of her daughters struggles with facing the mystery of Hannah's unspoken memories of grief.

2003 Selections

Depending on the time of day, Regina Burns is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown or an overdue breakthrough. One shattered heart and six months of rehab have left her wary and shell-shocked - especially with the prospect of taking a temporary consulting job in Atlanta, a move that would allow Regina to rescue the family home that she borrowed against when she was "a stomp down dope fiend." Her stone-faced banker has grudgingly agreed to give her sixty days to settle her debts or lose the house.[Also available in unabridged audiotape format.]

With a bit of last summer's sand in the pockets, the Traveling Pants and the Sisterhood that wears them embark on their 16th summer. Bridget: Impulsively sets off for Alabama, wanting to both confront her demons about her family and avoid them all at once. Lena: Spends a blissful week with Kostos, making the unexplainable silence that follows his visit even more painful. Carmen: Is concerned that her mother is making a fool of herself over a man. When she discovers that her mother borrowed the Pants to wear on a date, she's certain of it. Tibby: Not about to spend another summer working at Wallman's, she takes a film course only to find it's what happens off-camera that teaches her the most. [Teen Fiction][Also available in unabridged audiotape and book-on-CD formats.]

We Need To Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents - whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton - have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, and career - while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.

This brilliant fabulist novel combines the delight of Kipling's Just So Stories with the metaphysical adventure of "Jonah and the Whale," as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger.[Also available in unabridged audiotape format.]

It's March on Martha'&idx=title&op=and&qd. Too early for bluefish, but not too early for trouble. Former Olympic fencing champion turned millionaire real estate developer Donald Fox has targeted the island for his newest moneymaking scheme. With land values huge and many longtime residents in possession of fuzzy deeds of sometimes dubious legal value, Fox and his team plan to force people to sell cheap. Give up now or we'll fight you in court, is the threat. Even full-time fisherman and part-time investigator J.W. Jackson and wife, Zee, have been approached to sell their house to Fox. Big mistake. Given the escalating tensions, J.W.'s not particularly surprised when Donald Fox's brother, Paul, is shot down on a Vineyard street. But was Donald really the intended victim? Both Foxes have many enemies. And could a man named John Reilley be one of them? For reasons unrelated to land disputes, J.W. finds himself probing this mysterious man's past. Bad things are happening, and John Reilley may be involved.

2002 Selections

From the author of the bestselling Clockers and Freedomland comes a brilliant new novel of literary suspense--a story of crime, punishment, and the impulse to do good. Samaritan explores what happens when, caught up in the drama of one's own generosity, too little is given, too little is understood, and the result turns both tragic and potentially deadly.[Also available in abridged book-on-CD format.]

Much like the best-selling books by Og Mandino, this unique narrative is a blend of entertaining fiction, allegory, and inspiration. Storyteller Andy Andrews gives a front-row seat for one man's journey of a lifetime. David Ponder has lost his job and the will to live. When he is supernaturally selected to travel through time, he visits historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, King Solomon, and Anne Frank. Each visit yields a Decision for Success that will one day impact the entire world.

The bestselling author of Bombardiers and The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest traveled the world in search of people who had found meaningful answers to one of life's greatest questions: What should I do with my life?" Along the way, his own life was changed by conversations with these individuals, who, by daring to be honest with themselves, have found new direction and understanding in their lives.

Kuo's resume mentions the CIA and a US senator, but his concern here is his stint as senior vice president of communications at Value America, an on-line superstore that would sell anything to anyone without any overhead, and so was guaranteed to make everyone involved multi-millionaires. He rode it down to the very end.

The Big Chill meets Huckleberry Finn in a moving novel inspired by a real-life episode. Thirty-six years ago, Smith and 15 other college "girls" sailed a raft down the Mississippi River from Kentucky to New Orleans in giddy homage to Huck. Here she reimagines that prefeminist odyssey, and then updates it, as four of the raft's alumnae take a steamboat cruise in 1999 to recreate their river voyage and scatter the ashes of one of their own.[Also available in unabridged audiotape and Large Print formats.]

Throughout her childhood in suburban Ohio, Noelle struggled to gain love and affection from her distant father. In compensating for her father’s brusqueness, Noelle idolized her nurturing tomboy mother and her conservative grandma who tried to turn her into “a little lady.” At age fourteen, Noelle’s mom told her the family secret: “Dad likes to wear women’s clothes.” As Noelle copes with a turbulent adolescence, her father begins to metamorphose into the loving parent she had always longed for—only now outfitted in pedal pushers and pink lipstick.

The Secret Life of Bees follows a young girl who is taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters. As she enters their secret world of bees and honey, she discovers a place where she can find the single thing her heart longs for most. A movie version is forthcoming shortly.[Also available in two unabridged audio editions ( One, Two ), two unabridged book-on-CD editions ( One, Two ) and in Large Print format.]

From the author of the stunning memoir, Lucky, comes a fiction debut narrated from heaven. Starting with the first chapter, 14-year-old Susie Salmon recounts her rape and murder and watches her family as they cope with their grief.[Also available in unabridged audiotape, unabridged book-on-CD and Large Print formats.]

2002 Selections

The Colley family are modest farmers in the Missouri Ozarks. The Colleys try to remain neutral, a fact ignored by the Union militia who confiscate their livestock, burn their farm, and arrest their daughter on charges of "enemy collaboration." Yet as this innocent young woman soon discovers, fate can have a double edge. In unsentimental yet elegant prose, Jiles reveals the universal horrors of war and its irreparable damage, and introduces a wonderful new character in a memorable story.[Also available in unabridged audiotape and book-on-CD formats.]

At the age of twenty-three Carrie Bell has spent her entire life in Wisconsin, with the same best friend and the same dependable, easygoing, high school sweetheart. Now to her dismay she has begun to find this life suffocating and is considering leaving it - and Mike - behind. But when Mike is paralyzed in a diving accident, leaving seems unforgivable and yet more necessary than ever. The Dive From Clausen's Pier animates this dilemma -- and Carrie's startling response to it -- with the narrative assurance, exacting realism, and moral complexity we expect from the very best fiction.

last updated April 2011 sdc
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